Hadley, Tessa. Late in the Day. Harper. Jan. 2018. 288p. ISBN 9780062476692. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062476715. LITERARY

Couples Alexandr and Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been tight as glue since their twenties and thought that nothing would change. Decades later, when a distraught Lydia calls Alex and Christine to report that Zach has died, she’s immediately invited to come live with her old friends. But grandly generous Zach was their foundation, and the three left behind find that grief doesn’t bring them closer, instead highlighting old conflicts. From the lusciously articulate Hadley, winner of the 2016 Windham Campbell Prize.

Jonasson, Jonas. The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man. Morrow. Jan. 2019. 400p. tr. from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyle. ISBN 9780062846136. $26.99; pap. ISBN 9780062838551. $15.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062838568. lrg. prnt. POP FICTION

Allan Karlsson is back, having escaped his nursing home in the internationally best-selling The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Now he and buddy Julius, up in a hot air balloon with three bottles of champagne, crash-land into the sea and are saved by a North Korean ship carrying contraband uranium. And that crash-lands them in the midst of a huge diplomatic crisis. With a 100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing.

Shapiro, Dani. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love. Knopf. Jan. 2018. 272p. ISBN 9781524732714. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781524732721. Downloadable. MEMOIR The author of distinguished fiction but perhaps best known for her memoirs (most recently Hourglass), Shapiro surprises us again with her latest meditation. In a goofy mood in spring 2016, she submitted her DNA to a website for analysis and discovered that her father was not her biological father. What results is an exploration of family secrets, a painful rebuilding of her sense of self, and an understanding of how we manage whatever life tosses our way.

Walker, Karen Thompson. The Dreamers. Random. Jan. 2019. 320p. ISBN 9780812994162. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780812994179. lrg. prnt. CD/downloadable. POP FICTION A student at a California college falls asleep and cannot be wakened, and soon a mysterious, often lethal disease is sweeping the campus and the town beyond. Having wowed us with the New York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked The Age of Miracles, Walker here challenges our perceptions about time, mind, and reality while examining those tough situations when civil liberties butt against community interests and we must choose whom to save.